Life & Death - Hardcover

Creeley, Robert

4.07

152 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811213846 ISBN 13: 9780811213844

Publisher: New Directions, 1998

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If youth asks the mirror, "Am I the fairest?" then age, in Robert Creeley's skillful, ironic, and tender voice asks, "Do you remember me?" And the poems of Life & Death are the mirror's answers: a collage of recollection and salvage, a gathering-in before winter's night. The first section, "Histoire de Florida," is a partial autobiography at a specific time and place. It captures the poet in an engaged and highly compacted moment that deliberately echoes Wallace Stevens' "The Anecdote of the Jar"--a reverberation from the poet's youth. The second section of "Old Poems, Etc." contains classic reflections--from the doggerel humor of "'Present (present)'" to parody of early Metaphysical models like George Herbert in "Echo's Arrow." The capstone of this section is the sustained "The Dogs of Auckland" which focuses impressions from an extended time spent in that city and becomes a resume of age and its effects, made vividly objective by the contrasting culture of New Zealand. Artists have always proved decisive company for the poet, and the third section contains the texts of three collaborations with painter Francesco Clemente. Creeley's intention, as always, is "to keep writing, as Williams said, for the fun of it. What else?"

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Review:

Body
Breath
Credo
The Dogs Of Auckland
Echo
Echo's Arrow
Edges
Fearful Love
A Feeling
Four Days In Vermont
Given
Goodbye
Hand
Help
Histoire De Florida
In The Diamond
Inside My Head
Life & Death
The Long Road
Loop
Loops
The Mirror
Mitch
Oh My God
Old Poems
Old Story
Out Here
Pictures
Present (present)
The Rose
Sear At The Center
Signs
Silence
The Skull
The Star
The Swan
There
Thinking
The Tools
A Valentine For Pen
When It Comes
Won't It Be Fine?
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder�

There is [in Creeley's work] precisely a soulful tenacity, a hybrid between devotion and obsession, that keeps him a major poet. -- Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash

From Library Journal:

Creeley's poems have always been to-the-point, but here they are scrubbed down to the essentials, as befits the theme: Creeley is a mature poet, looking back on life and considering what (little) might lie ahead. Intense, shadowed, and powerfully restrained, these poems are miniatures but hardly small. Creeley has packed them with tremendous vision.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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